Summary
Jerry continues to watch the boys dive. This time, they all disappear for over two minutes under water. Jerry is panicked and worried that the boys have drowned, but they eventually all reappear on the other side of the rock as before. They swim to the shore and Jerry watches as they gather their clothes and run to another collection of rocks. Alone, Jerry cries.
He once again attempts to find the hole where the boys swam through, but he cannot see. He goes back to the villa and waits for his mother. When she comes in, he asks her to buy him a pair of goggles. As soon as he has the goggles in hand, he runs back to the bay and dives down deep into the water. He sees fish everywhere, and finally spies the bottom of the rock through which the boys had swum. He inspects it for a hole but finds none. After multiple tries, his feet are finally met with no resistance against the rock, and he determines that he found the hole.
Returning to the surface, Jerry uses a large rock to weigh himself down as he dives back toward the bottom of the sea. He attempts to swim through the hole, but only makes it to his shoulders before he panics and returns to the surface for air. He feels compelled to keep trying, determined to make it through the hole. He starts counting how long he can hold his breath underwater. When the sun goes down, he returns to the villa to eat with his mother. That night, his nose bleeds and his mother is worried.
The next day, Jerry keeps practicing and training his lungs underwater. His nose bleeds again, more profusely this time, when he returns home in the evening. His mother encourages him to come with her to her beach the next day, and Jerry does so, but feels like the sandy beach is now a beach only for children.
Analysis
The middle of the story largely focuses on the difficulty of Jerry's task. After the boys leave Jerry behind, he cries. He then, notably, swims far enough out so that he can once again locate his mother on the sandy beach. This small detail suggests that Jerry's response to his initial failure—he could not find the hole that the other boys had found to swim through—is to return to the comforts of his mother. Thus, the story temporarily implies that Jerry will abandon the rocks and, distraught, return to the safe, sandy beach. However, after locating his mother, he once again dives down to inspect the rock for an opening. This sequence of events is significant because it shows how Jerry's compulsion for independence is just that: he instinctively desires his autonomy at the same time he requires the distant presence of his mother to pursue it. Here, the story ultimately suggests that the transition from childhood to adulthood is not simply a rejection of one's innocence, but instead a foray into new territory accompanied by the support and safety of other adults.
As the story continues, the narrator focuses on the labor and repetition necessary for Jerry to accomplish his feat. His attempts to breach the hole in rock are met with struggle, panic, and doubt. When Jerry's nose begins bleeding, it is a sign of the physical toll that his efforts have taken on his body. But it is also a figurative suggestion of how adulthood transforms a person in both body and mind: Jerry gradually develops his lungs to hold air for longer, indicating that the transition into the unknown territory of adulthood is marked by physical as well as mental changes, each accompanied by failures and setbacks. At the end of this section, Jerry spends a day on the sandy beach with his mother to give himself a break from his lung capacity exercises. "It was a torment to him to waste a day of his careful self-training," he narrator says, "but he stayed with her on that other beach, which now seemed a place for small children, a place where his mother might lie safe in the sun. It was not his beach" (6). Here, the story suggests that Jerry has effectively already left his childlike comforts for the labor, struggle, and difficulty of adulthood as embodied by the rocks and the deep water on the other side of the beach.
